1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for graphically tracking people, vehicles and equipment and graphically selecting groups of these with which to interact.
2. Discussion of Related Art
In many emergency situations, the locations of people, vehicles and/or pieces of equipment (collectively, “Mobile Units”) must be known. This is especially true of first responders such as firefighters, police and paramedics. Since they must act immediately, and require specialized vehicles and equipment, it is imperative that they know the locations of these Mobile Units. Providing locations and other data using voice description rarely works well in these emergency situations where there is a large amount of ‘radio chatter’ at the scene.
In events such as the terrorist attacks on Sep. 11, 2001, there was a great deal of radio chatter which blocked all radio channels and did not allow the first responders to communicate with each other.
In addition, sometimes it is necessary to also receive data information from these Mobile Units.
Prior art systems exist for graphically providing the real-time location of vehicles, such as airplanes. These historically were derived from radar images that were overlaid upon maps. Even though these systems provide a graphical method of identifying the location of aircraft, these would not easily convert to a system to track firefighters or other first responders. These would require expensive radar and additional modification to determine the location of Mobile Units.
Prior art cellular telephones now have GPS capability, which will send the location of each unit. These GPS locations are protected information and not published or allowed to be used in other systems. Therefore, these cannot be used to graph the locations of several Mobile Units simultaneously.
In addition to locating first responders, their equipment and receiving data about them, it is also necessary to send information and communicate with several selected responders at the same time while not communicating this information to other responders. This may occur when several responders are close to a dangerous area. The base would like to notify these three quickly to leave, but not to contact the others to reduce “chatter” at the emergency site. There currently is no system which accomplishes this goal.
Currently, there is a need for an intuitive system for tracking mobile units and for easily interacting with selected groups of these Mobile Units.